Northwest Academy junior Max Orton was recently admitted into the Reed College Young Scholars program and is learning how to operate the campus nuclear reactor.
Orton has been interested in math and science since he was young, and has always wanted to know more about things that he did not understand.
“I think [the reason that] I ended up getting interested in [math], is because when I was younger I watched tons of Nova documentaries without understanding the math,” said Orton. “And they would keep flashing up these super dramatic equations on the screen, and as a young child […] I tried to find out what those symbols were.”
Orton’s interest in math and science did not stop with decoding Nova documentaries. He moved onto larger and more complicated equations throughout his schooling at Sunnyside Environmental School and Northwest Academy, which eventually led him to apply to the physics program at Reed College. He was initially turned down, but was instead offered a position at the nuclear reactor by the director Jerry Newhouse.
“[At Reed] they pass all of the applications around the department you apply to,” said Orton. “And the guy [Newhouse] that is in charge of the nuclear reactor saw it, and he brought me in, and I have been doing that since.”
Orton is not yet ready to run experiments with the reactor, as there is a six-month training period to learn its operations, but he has projects to begin working on after those six months.
“The first half of the year you learn how to use [the reactor] so you don’t blow up Portland,” said Orton. “The second half of the year, they are having me do an experiment in the reactor that might be publishable.”
The reactor, which is a TRIGA Mark I, was built by General Atomics and sits at the bottom of a 25-foot-deep tank. The machine was introduced on Reed’s campus in 1968, and has been used for education and research, primarily trace-element analysis. It is open to Reed students and members of the Young Scholars program, such as Orton.
